Pharmaceutical CEO Who Jacked Up HIV Drug Price Arrested

Share this:

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

[van id=”video/news/2015/09/22/daraprim-drug-price-hike.cnnmoney”]

NEW YORK, N.Y. — Pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli, widely pilloried for jacking up the price of a drug used to treat AIDS patients, has been indicted on criminal charges that he bilked a company out of millions of dollars.

The accusations do not relate to Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that raised the price of Daraprim by more than 5,000%.

Instead, the federal case centers on his time as CEO of Retrophin, another biotech company that ousted him last year. The indictment, brought by prosecutors in Brooklyn, was unsealed Thursday.

Shkreli and an alleged co-conspirator, an attorney who worked with him at Retrophin, face securities fraud and conspiracy charges alleging that they improperly channeled $7.6 million in cash and Retrophin stock through sham consulting agreements.

But Shkreli recently took over another small publicly-traded drug company, KaloBios, which develops cancer drugs.

Shares of KaloBios soared 400% on the day after the takeover news. But they plunged 50% Thursday before trading was halted.

Shkreli had run a group of hedge funds, the MSMB Funds, before he started Retrophin in 2011.

Earlier this year, he became headline fodder with the drug price hike at Turing.

Shkreli has been the focus of widespread criticism in the media, which dubbed him “the most hated man in America,” as well as by politicians. He defiantly defended the price increase in interviews and frequent tweets.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called him a “poster child of greed,” and refused to keep a $2,700 contribution Shkreli made to his campaign. Sanders gave the money to a community health center